It hasn’t been finalized yet but the process isn’t going to be that big a change as you’d expect.

Basically, in addition to checking basics like whether you’ve added the hooks, inserting scripts and CSS the right way and others, we’re going to be a bit more tough regarding the usage of deprecated tags and whether your custom PHP code raises any errors, notices or warnings.

What happened is that some templates are a little oddly coded and thus raised issues when used with third party plugins. With a more standardized codebase, this should only rarely happen and we’re tweaking the review process slightly to improve the overall quality of themes here on TF. Authors who have submitted a template in the last week or so should have seen a small part of the new process.

ZoomIt said
I think it means that if they approve the first version, the other updates are auto approved. I think it makes sense 100%.

This is just a safeguard since auto updating gives a lot of leeway for monkey business in the future. You must also have noted that the turnaround for review times—both for the main and update queues—has been decreased a bit so hopefully this should be even less of a problem in the future.